80's American Horror Part Sixty-Three

NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR

(1985)

Dir - Jay Schlossberg-Cohen/John Carr/Phillip Marshak/Tom McGowan/Gregg C. Tallas

Overall: WOOF

 

A fascinatingly awful trainwreck, (har, har), which both disastrously and hilariously cobbles together four different movies, Night Train to Terror could be the most head-scratching anthology horror film ever vomited unto the masses.  Each of the three segments are made up of footage from just as many previously unreleased movies, with a preposterous framing narrative of Satan and God arguing in a train while a bunch of painfully white white people all music video-out to the same embarrassingly terrible song over and over again.  Things are bizarrely off-putting from the get-go, yet the rails fly off once the first story gets underway; a story that unfolds as a montage which bulldozes through its entire narrative with reckless abandon.  Same goes for the next two episodes, each one equally incomprehensible simply due to the fact that they were all originally supposed to be their own full-length properties and not just smashed together into an incoherent highlight reel.  The "quality" of the segments themselves is just as bad, with scenery-gorging performances and stop-motion animation that a Mr. Bill sketch would be ashamed of.  Whoever's cocaine-fueled idea this was deserves props for how completely idiotic and ill-conceived it is and for anyone curious as to what Ed Wood Jr. would have probably been allowed to do with creative freedom had he lived until 1985, here lies your answer.

REVENGE
(1986)
Dir - Christopher Lewis
Overall: MEH

Graduating from SOV to 16mm, (not that anyone would notice), Christopher Lewis' Blood Cult sequel Revenge, (Revenge: Blood Cult 2), scores both John Wayne's son Patrick and "Anything for a buck" genre thespian John Carradine, each of whom provide the star power to what is ultimately just another regional hack-job.  Comparatively, this is a more polished effort from Lewis who utilizes his professional equipment to stage things conventionally if not effective in an atmospheric sense, (not least of all because the majority of scenes take place in broad, sunny daylight and merely consist of characters sitting across from each other while talking).  He still has no sense of pacing and fails to elevate the stock story which is about an evil dog cult that is full of political higher-ups who sacrifice people because Satan, as well as simply murder others who get in the way or ask too many questions.  The performances are acceptable and the cheap keyboard score never shuts the hell up, but none of the set pieces are memorable and the movie's more straight-faced sheen actually undoes what maid Lewis' previous entries stand out, be it in a laughably terrible way.  It still has incompetent ADR placing. tomato soup blood, and illogical details like someone calling a woman several times without saying anything, only to ominously utter "Get out" once she answers the phone and gets frustrated enough times, but it is all relentlessly boring stuff.

HOUSE II: THE SECOND STORY

(1987)

Dir - Ethan Wiley

Overall: MEH

For his directorial debut, Ethan Wiley collaborated with screenwriter Fred Dekker and producer Sean S. Cunningham on the second installment in the House franchise, fittingly titled House II: The Second Story.  A full-blown comedy this time with nyuck-nyucks provided by comedic players Arye Gross, Johnathan Stark, and Bill Maher, it is a dopey affair that throws plot logistics to the wind and fails to land almost all of its intended humor.  That said, there is a wacky charm to it that is due to numerous inventive set pieces in a completely different mansion from that in the first movie, which is home to otherwordly portals that send our gang of schlubs into prehistoric times, the Old West, and an ancient Aztec temple.  The make-up, sets, and special effects are also of a high quality for what is essentially an unabashed B-movie, with stop-motion animation, puppetry, and gnarly zombie designs for both Royal Dano and Gregory Walcott who play dueling cowboys.  It is a shame that Wiley took Dekker's ideas and churned them out with a barrage of juvenile gags that are predictably groan-worthy, plus the story barely establishes any supernatural rules to follow which gives it lazy, creative license to throw any type of convenient plot maneuver and "bozo fall down" bit of silliness into the mix.  It is lighthearted enough as not to offend the viewer's intelligence, (at least too much), and for a series that was already slapdash and not taking itself seriously, this one fits right in.